Foreign Correspondence
Foreign Correspondence
Edited by
Jan Borm and Benjamin Colbert
Foreign Correspondence,
Edited by Jan Borm and Benjamin Colbert
This book first published 2014
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2014 by Jan Borm, Benjamin Colbert and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-6211-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6211-0
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors................................................................................ vii
Introduction .............................................................................................. xii
Jan Borm and Benjamin Colbert
Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1
Between the West and the East: Identity in Lithuanian Travel Writing
Regina Rudaitytė
Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19
The Narrator in Mandeville’s Travels as Foreign Correspondent
Fanny Moghaddassi
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 39
Poland in the Seventeenth Century as Seen by French Travellers
Włodzimierz Zientara
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 57
The Attractions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Pierre des Noyers
and Jean-François Regnard, Two Early Modern French Observers
Jan Borm
Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 76
Homes Away From Home: Intermarriage, Border Crossing, and Social
Integration in Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters
Ludmilla Kostova
Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 92
The Romantic Inter-Nation: Newspaper Aesthetics in Galignani’s
Messenger and John Scott’s Visit to Paris
Benjamin Colbert
vi
Table of Contents
Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 107
“Wanderers of the 19th Century”: The Correspondence between Zygmunt
Krasiński and Henry Reeve
Monika Coghen
Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 121
Henry David Inglis, First Literary Tourist in Spain
Pedro Javier Pardo
Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 137
The Prospect of Translation: Helen Maria Williams and Xavier
de Maistre’s Le Lépreux de la Cité d’Aoste
Paul Hague
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 150
Acts of Translation: George Borrow’s Letters to the British
and Foreign Bible Society, 1833-1840
Hilary Weeks
Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 165
From Travel Letters to Printed Books: The Indian Travel Writings
of Maria Graham
Betty Hagglund
Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 175
Travel as Political Meditation in Antanas Baranauskas’s Verse Epistle,
Journey to Petersburg (1858–1859)
Dalia Čiočytė
Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 186
Missives with a Mission: Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s Chronicles
from Paris to the Hispanic World
Glyn Hambrook
Bibliography ............................................................................................ 205
Index ........................................................................................................ 223
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Jan Borm is Full Professor in British Literature and Director of the
research laboratory CEARC (Culture, Environment, Arctic, Representation,
Climate) at the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. He has
published widely on travel writing in English, French, and German. Coeditor of Bruce Chatwin’s posthumous volume Anatomy of Restlessness
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), author of the portrait Jean Malaurie, un
homme singulier (Paris: éditions du Chêne, 2005), he has also co-edited
several collective volumes including Convertir/Se Convertir: regards
croisés sur l’histoire des missions chrétiennes (Paris: Nolin, 2006),
Christentum und der Natürliche Mensch/Christianisme et l’homme naturel
(Marburg: Förderverein “Völkerkunde in Marburg” (e.V., 2010) and
Savoir et pouvoir au siècle des Lumières (Paris: éditions de Paris, 2011).
Dalia Čiočytė is Associate Professor at Vilnius University. Her
publications include two monographs, The Bible in Lithuanian Literature
(Vilnius: Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, 1999) and
Theology of Literature: Theological aspects of Lithuanian Literature
(Vilnius University, 2013), as well as numerous articles on such topics as
the classical paradigm in literature and on theology of literature as an
interdisciplinary theory. The courses she teaches reflect the main fields of
her scholarly interests: the paradigm of the Bible and Antiquity in
literature, literature and theology, Christian literary contexts, Literary
theory, and Classical consciousness in late-nineteenth-century Lithuanian
literature.
Monika Coghen is Reader in English Literature at the Jagiellonian
University in Kraków. She has worked on British Romanticism and
Anglo-Polish cultural relations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
She has published numerous articles, particularly on dramas by Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and Byron, and the Polish reception of Coleridge and
Shelley. Her other areas of interest include the British nineteenth-century
novel and Polish Romanticism. She is currently working on the reception
of Byron in Poland.
viii
Notes on Contributors
Benjamin Colbert is Reader in English Literature and Co-Director of the
Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research at the University of
Wolverhampton. He is the author of Shelley’s Eye: Travel Writing and
Aesthetic Vision (Ashgate, 2005), and has edited a number of essay
collections and scholarly editions, including Travel Writing and Tourism
in Britain and Ireland (2012), Women’s Travel Writings in PostNapoleonic France, vols. 5-8 (Pickering & Chatto, 2012), and British
Satire 1785-1840, vol. 3 (Pickering & Chatto, 2003). With Lucy Morrison,
he is currently editing Continental Tourism and Travel Writing 18151915, and he is leading a major database project, British Travel Writing
1780-1840, from which a pilot, Women’s Travel Writing 1780-1840, has
been published online (2014). Colbert has served on the Steering
Committee of the International Society for Travel Writing (2006-11) and
is Book Review Editor for European Romantic Review.
Betty Hagglund is Project Development Officer, Dissemination and
Public Engagement, at the Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies,
Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre/University of Birmingham/University
of Lancaster, and Lead Officer on a funded project on “Quakers and
World War I.” Her publications include Tourists and Travellers (Channel
View Publications, 2010), scholarly editions of travel writing by Maria
Graham and Harriet Morton, and a number of articles and book chapters
on travel and travel writing. Research interests include seventeenthcentury book distribution networks, missionary travel writing, the
application of Bakhtinian theory to travel writing, and histories of World
War I internment. She is currently editing travel writings by Catherine
Hutton and Anne Grant for Pickering & Chatto, together with other
writings by Margaret Coghlan, Elizabeth Hanson, and Ann Carson. She is
also the author of a number of general interest books on travel,
exploration, and Quakerism.
Paul Hague is a postgraduate student at the University of Wolverhampton,
currently writing his PhD thesis on the translation works of Helen Maria
Williams. A romanticist, with a particular interest in the inter-relations
between German, French, and British literary exchange at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, Hague’s work examines the role of Williams as a
trans-literary, trans-cultural mediator. As well as conducting his research,
Paul has co-edited (with Benjamin Colbert) Frances Trollope’s Paris and
the Parisians in 1835, vol. 8 of Women’s Travel Writings in PostNapoleonic France, a two-part edition of the Chawton House Library
collection: Women’s Travel Writings (Pickering & Chatto, 2012).
Foreign Correspondence
ix
Glyn Hambrook is Reader in Comparative and European Literature and
Co-Director for the Centre for Transnational and Cultural Research,
University of Wolverhampton. He is also Co-Editor of Comparative
Critical Studies, the journal of the British Comparative Literature
Association, and a member of the editorial board of the Revue de
Littérature Comparée. His research focuses on the European Fin de Siècle,
and in particular the reception and translation of Francophone literature in
Spain. His recent publications include The Reception of Francophone
Literature in the Modernista Review Helios (1903-1904) (Edwin Mellen,
2013) and a co-edited volume (with Montserrat Cots and Pere Gifra),
Interrogating Gazes. Comparative Critical Views on the Representation of
Foreignness and Otherness (Peter Lang, 2013). Forthcoming work
includes a translation, with critical and contextual commentary, of
Leopoldo Lugones’s short story “Kábala práctica” and articles based on
further research into the reception of the work of Charles Baudelaire in
Spain.
Ludmilla K. Kostova is Professor of British literature and cultural studies
at St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Turnovo. She has
published on eighteenth-century, romantic, and modern British literature
as well as on travel writing and representations of intercultural encounters.
Her book Tales of the Periphery: the Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British
Writing (St. Cyril and St. Methodius University Press, 1997) has been
repeatedly cited by specialists in the field. Together with Charles Forsdick
and Corinne Fowler, Kostova is editor of Travel Writing and Ethics.
Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2013). She is a member of the editorial
boards of Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Word and Text: A Journal
of Literary Studies and Linguistics, and The Annals of Ovidius University
Constanta – Philology.
Fanny Moghaddassi is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieur
in Lyon and is now Associate Professor at the Université de Strasbourg.
She specialises in Middle English literature, and more specifically on
travel as a cross-generic recurrent motif. In 2010, she published
Géographies du monde, géographies de l’âme, le voyage dans la
littérature anglaise de la fin du Moyen Age (Paris: Champion), a
developed analysis of the theme of travelling in Middle English romances,
lays, visions, and exploration narratives. She is currently working on the
literary techniques presiding over the representation of otherness, with a
specific focus on the various transformations space and time undergo in
such narratives. She has also published various articles on Middle English
x
Notes on Contributors
popular romances and medieval travel writing, namely Mandeville’s
Travels.
Pedro Javier Pardo is Reader in English Literature at the University of
Salamanca. His main research interests are the reception and influence of
Cervantes in the English-speaking world and the relations between
literature and film. His publications include La tradición cervantina en la
novela inglesa del siglo XVIII (1997) as well as a number of articles on the
relationship between Cervantes and Beaumont, Richardson, Fielding,
Smollett, Sterne, Diderot, Thackeray, or Twain. He is the author of several
entries on these and other authors for the Gran Enciclopedia Cervatina
(2005- ), a multi-volume work for which he has coordinated the area of
Cervantes in American and English literature. He has also edited Sylvia
Beach’s Shakespeare and Company (2000), two collections of essays on
the representation of the foreigner for 1616 (2011) and Comparative
Critical Studies (2012), and one more on film and literature beyond
adaptation (2014). In this field he has recently published articles on the
theory and practice of cinematic rewriting of literary texts and on
metafiction.
Regina Rudaitytė is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at
Vilnius University. She holds an MA in English Studies from Vilnius
University and an MA in the Novel from the University of East Anglia.
She received her Ph.D. in American Literature from the Lomonosow
Moscow State University. She is Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Philology
and former Chair of the Department of Literary History and Theory at
Vilnius University, and a national representative on the ESSE board. She
has published widely on contemporary British fiction, women’s writing,
literary translation, and is the author of The Metamorphosis of Character
in Postmodern Fiction (2000), and An Outline of Contemporary British
Fiction (2006). She edited the volumes Postmodernism and After. Visions
and Revisions (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) and Literature in
Society (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). Her most recent
contribution is a chapter on the Lithuanian reception of Dickens for the
volume The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe, ed. Michael
Hollington (Bloomsbury, 2013).
Hilary Weeks is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Gloucestershire. Her research interests include nineteenth-century English
and European literature, relationships between literature and architecture;
Foreign Correspondence
xi
religion; and travel writing. She has published articles on George Borrow
and the antiquarian novelist Thomas Hope.
Włodzimierz Zientara is Full Professor in German Studies at the Nicolas
Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, where he directs the section of
early modern literature and culture in the German department. His
research focuses on the province of Royal Prussia, images of Poland in
travel accounts, periodicals, and calendars of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and stereotypes in early modern Europe. He teaches
German history and the history of German-Polish relations. He is the
author of a habilitation thesis entitled Sarmatia Europiana oder Sarmatia
Asiana? Polen in den deutschsprachigen Druckwerken des 17. Jahrhunderts
published by Toruń University Press in 2001 (2nd ed. 2003).
INTRODUCTION
JAN BORM AND BENJAMIN COLBERT
The Lithuanian writer and artist Romualdas Lankauskas, whose
painting “Carnival” (2001) features on the cover of this collective volume,
observes: “Well-written travel books are by no means inferior to fiction
produced by famous writers; they can be fascinating and valuable because
they impart knowledge about foreign countries, brighten the reader’s
horizons and help to better know the world which is important indeed. The
experience of reading a travel book is like taking a journey together with
the one who has visited other countries.”1 Several key issues are addressed
by Lankauskas in his remarks which focus on the value of travel writing,
notably in allusion to the shifting status the form has been frequently
exposed to. Though writers and readers have agreed from the earliest times
that travel does not only broaden the mind but that it is useful to report on
such an experience, an idea then repeated with renewed vigour during the
Renaissance by Montaigne2 among others, the question of what to report
on and how has remained a matter of debate, a number of authors
including Sir Francis Bacon offering their own advice and lists of items to
be remarked on.3 Whether one intends to write a full-length travelogue or
letters from abroad, the problem remains the same.
Which items make it into the New York Times the narrator of Uwe
Johnson’s monumental novel Anniversaries wonders?4 And, one would be
tempted to add, in what form? The question is notably raised by one of the
chief correspondents of France in Poland-Lithuania in the seventeenth
century, Pierre des Noyers, secretary to the French Queens of Poland
Louise-Marie de Gonzague and Marie Casimire de La Grange d’Arquien,
complaining repeatedly about the lack of accuracy in reports published in
the Gazette de France.5 Travellers have not only been pinpointed as
notorious liars, liable to produce yarns about faraway places that
correspond more or less, if at all, to what may indeed be observed out
there, but have also revealed themselves to be lame ducks, as it were,
when it comes to perceiving a situation correctly. Some travellers have
inspired extraordinary tales, as Alexander Selkirk did, thanks, partly, to
Richard Steele’s article in The Englishman that sparked Daniel Defoe’s
Foreign Correspondence
xiii
imagination.6 Others have used the press to advertise their own
achievements, as Bougainville did, in suggesting that his friend Dr
Commerson publish a letter in the Mercure de France about Tahiti
baptized “New Cytherea” by the former, an epistle that was to inflame the
minds of many.7 A century later, Robert Edwin Peary’s and Frederick
Cook’s attempts to reach the North Pole made for excellent stories that
newspapers did not refrain from publishing without having any verifiable
information at hand other than what either explorer claimed to have
achieved.
At the other end of the scale of such foreign correspondence, one
would find secret reports sent from abroad, including the coded reports of
diplomats that would then only be transcribed at home and made available
to a strictly limited circle of readers; witness the secret correspondence of
French ambassador to Poland-Lithuania, Béthune, in the second half of the
seventeenth century, now kept with the transcriptions written directly
above the coded messages at the archives of the French Foreign Office, as
well as unpublished private letters. However wide or reduced the
readership of such foreign correspondence may have been, this type of
travel writing contributes to the image a reader may have about elsewhere.
Foreign correspondence therefore plays an important role in the
construction of views about other places and people, and is consequently
of prime interest in the field of comparative cultural history and the study
of textual (but also visual) representations of otherness. The use of literary
strategies in such productions may vary considerably, depending partly on
the interaction between exterior pressure (instructions, taste, and
convention) and individual expression (observation skills and style). The
chapters of this volume primarily focus on the notion of foreign
correspondence, a dual problematic oscillating between the private and the
public, as one of the principal media of travel writing, whether it be
actually letters or other forms of writing sent from abroad.
Nevertheless, for as long as travel has been established as a
commercial and cultural practice, the letter has had a special status. Its
forms include the letter of introduction, the letter of credit, letters carried
abroad and letters sent home. Letters solicit material aid, testify to the
bearer’s character, and serve as informal passports to networks of
exchange, culture, and conversation without which the traveller would be
left to his or her own devices. Alternatively, letters home represent the
traveller-cum-tourist’s descriptive medium, self account, translation and
transfer of foreign manners, customs, events, statistics, and anecdotes, the
full range and texture of life that must serve to represent and demonstrate
the verisimilitude of travel experience. Such is the letter’s status that
xiv
Introduction
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing adopted the epistolary
genre (as did many novels), along with the journal, as one of its principal
formal structures, whether or not the letters so crafted ever paid postage.
To think of travel and travel writing as “foreign correspondence,”
however, is to apply metaphorically a phrase that has its own complex and
overlapping history in journalism, politics, and international culture. In
English journalism, foreign correspondence has long been associated with
a transnational world of letters. In the late eighteenth century, The London
Review of English and Foreign Literature, for example, supplemented its
regular domestic correspondence with occasional “Foreign Correspondence.”
From 1757 The Monthly Review ran a section, “Foreign Literature. By Our
Correspondents,” shortened to “Foreign Correspondence” in the running
header, its function again being to acquaint home readers with the
literature of European and American writers, in translation where
necessary.8
The practice of English journalists acting as foreign correspondents,
sending dispatches of events abroad for publication at home, is of a later
date. Arthur Young, for the Morning Post, and John Walter I, editor of The
Times, first introduced foreign staff onto their papers; while Walter’s son,
John Walter II, began sending reporters abroad, including Henry Crabb
Robinson to Altona outside Hamburg in January 1807.9 In the aftermath of
the Napoleonic wars, several journal editors, including William Jerdan for
The Sun and John Scott for The Champion, joined the throngs of sightseers
and battlefield tourists to send back exclusive reports, in Scott’s case
collected into a bestselling travel book after serialization in his journal.10
From 1814 the Paris-based English-language newspaper Galignani’s
Messenger, meanwhile, built itself around an informal network of agents
and correspondents, who took it upon themselves to transmit European
periodicals, private letters, and third-person accounts to the editors in
Paris, who in turn translated, abridged, rearranged, and grangerized their
source materials into the fabric of the paper. By the 1830s, the role of the
newspaper foreign correspondent had become established as other
international papers began to vie with Galignani’s for this new market, and
journals began claiming exclusivity abroad with reference to “our own
correspondent.”11
The traveller-as-correspondent appears also in the many figures whose
cosmopolitanism in the sciences, arts, and humanities qualified them to be
considered correspondents to the many learned societies that were formed
during the Enlightenment throughout Europe, with such foreign
correspondents holding honorary positions blazoned on the title pages of
books. Joseph Baretti, James Boswell, and Prince Hoare all advertised
Foreign Correspondence
xv
themselves at one point or another as Secretary for Foreign Correspondence
to the Royal Academy. C. E. Boettiger was Secretary for Foreign
Correspondence to the Saxon Bible Society; the Rev. Dr McClure to the
American and Foreign Christian Union, 1855-57. Other organizations that
had such a post included the United Foreign Missionary Society; the Royal
Institute for British Architects; the Medico-Botanical Society of London;
and the American Anti-Slavery Society.
Of course, as already suggested, the purposes of foreign correspondence
were not always so high minded, for the phrase also at times denoted a
form of espionage, the private gathering of information on foreign affairs
for the benefit of home security. With this kind of correspondence,
discretion and secrecy were the order of the day; as Sir James Steuart
advised in his Political Oeconomy (1770), “It is the duty of every
statesman to watch over the conduct of those who hold the foreign
correspondence, as it is the duty of the master of a family to watch over
those he sends to market”12 (Tom Paine was ejected from the Committee
for Foreign Affairs in the United States for making public through the
newspapers material that could only have been obtained through foreign
correspondence.) During the early stages of the French Revolution, British
corresponding societies represented their interests to the French National
Assembly, which, if their critics’ charges have any basis, were at times
taken as representations of the British nation.13
As Mary Favret puts it, “by means of the angle of presentation, the
letter becomes public property”;14 its audiences shift with the uses to
which it is put. Similarly, the phrase “foreign correspondence” has
multiple dimensions, some wrapped up in the histories of journalism,
correspondence, and tourism, and some more metaphorically invoking the
links between nations sutured within the textual spaces of travel writings
considered more broadly. The essays collected here all take correspondence
as their starting point, though letters are not always the sole signs of such
correspondences; even when epistolary forms are under interrogation,
however, the essays here show too how letters themselves are involved in
complex webs of personal, political, social, and cultural negotiations
between travellers and their hosts.
Notes
1
Romualdas Lankauskas, interview by Jan Borm, May 2014, Vilnius; trans.
Regina Rudaitytė.
2
Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,” The Complete Essays of
Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
xvi
Introduction
1958), bk. 1, ch. 26, p. 112: “For this reason, mixing with men is wonderfully
useful, and visiting foreign countries, not merely to bring back, in the manner of
our French noblemen, knowledge of the measurements of the Santa Rotonda, or of
the richness of Signora Livia’s drawers, or, like some others, how much longer or
wider Nero’s face is in some old ruin there than on some similar medallion; but to
bring back knowledge of the characters and ways of those nations, and to rub and
polish our brains by contact with those of others.”
3
Sir Francis Bacon, Bacon’s Essays (London: J. Parker and Sons, 1858), 195-97.
4
Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries: from the life of Gesine Cresspahl, trans. Leila
Vennewitz and Walter Arndt (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), vols.
1 (1975) and 2 (1987).
5
See Jan Borm’s chapter in this volume.
6
Richard Steele, The Englishman: Being the Sequel of the Guardian 26 (Dec. 3,
1713): 168-73.
7
“Lettre de M. Commerson,” in Mercure de France, November 1769, 197-207.
8
See Advertisement, The Monthly Review, or Literary Journal 15 (1756), n.p.: “A
succinct account of Foreign Publications having been desired by several Friends to
our Review, we take this Opportunity of acquainting them, and the Public, that this
Task is undertaken by a Set of learned and ingenious Correspondents. / These
Articles will be regularly continued, every Month, unless prevented by the
Accidents to which a foreign Correspondence is liable . . . The foreign Articles will
commence in the Review for February, 1757.”
9
John Hohenberg, Foreign Correspondence: the Great Reporters and Their Times
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995), ch. 1, esp. 2-5.
10
See Benjamin Colbert’s chapter in this volume.
11
The earliest reference to this phrase, “our own correspondent,” appears in
Cobbett’s Political Register 36 (June 10, 1820), col. 954, reporting on Queen
Caroline’s landing in France (and possibly excerpted from The Times) and occurs
with increasing frequency in the 1830s and beyond, often in quotation marks. See
Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (New York, 1835),
135, which mentions “the foreign correspondent of the Evening Post” in “Florence,
Italy.”
12
Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy; Being
an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations, 3 vols. (Dublin,
1770), 1:416.
13
See A British Freeholder’s Address to His Countrymen, on Thomas Paine’s
Rights of Man (London, 1791), 16-17: “[The Revolution Society] depreciate[s] the
House of Commons for not being annually elected by the whole body of the
people; and yet this self-elected club usurps the power of representation of the
kingdom––for foreign correspondence: and there are members of the National
Assembly who, on such authority, speak of the British nation as favourable to their
schemes.”
14
Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics & the Fiction of
Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2.
CHAPTER ONE
BETWEEN THE WEST AND THE EAST:
IDENTITY IN LITHUANIAN TRAVEL WRITING
REGINA RUDAITYTĖ
Since antiquity, people have always been fascinated by travels to
distant foreign lands associated with unknown experiences and exciting
adventures. But travel is not only a means of acquiring knowledge about
the unknown “Other”; by travelling we shape the world with our minds,
thus shaping ourselves. Travelling also means a journey of self-discovery.
Homi Bhabha speaks about “re-creation of the self in the world of travel.”1
Travelling means negotiating with cultural difference and cultural
hybridity, with cross-cultural initiation and, probably, with one’s own
multiple identities opened up in the world of travel. These problematic
issues are mirrored by travel writing in the form of a record of journeys,
diaries, and memoirs with the focus not only on the discovery of places
but also on their creation. As Peter Bishop rightly observes, “travel
accounts are involved in the production of imaginative knowledges. They
are an important aspect of a culture’s myth-making.”2 A travel text,
structured as a narrative, becomes an important cultural document, and, as
with any other form of narrative, raises not only the issue of representation
but also the question of national and cultural identity construction. Identity
is marked by ambiguity and fluidity; it is never fixed and stable, changing
across time; it is determined by history, ideology, power relations, and
constructed by historically and ideologically specific discursive practices.
This is the discursive approach to identification which is seen as a
construction, an on-going process never completed. Stuart Hall writes:
Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse,
we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and
institutional sites within specific discursive formations and practices, by
specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of
specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking
2
Chapter One
of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical,
naturally-constituted unity.3
Identity is constructed through difference, through the relation to the
Other. According to Bhabha, identity is shaped through “visual demand
for a knowledge of the Other, and its representation in the act of
articulation and enunciation.”4 Thus the discovery of the Other acquires a
particular significance for the construction of identity. It is through
cultural difference, through the knowledge of the Other that national
identity is reflected. I should think this could be a valid theoretical frame
of reference for my argument. It is through this lens that I will look into
Lithuanian travel writing as a reflection of personal and national
consciousness, focusing on a few of what I assume to be iconic texts
pertaining to different historical epochs. I will try to situate Lithuanian
travel writing within social and historical contexts, reading some chosen
travel texts in relation to culture and ideology as their appeal essentially
lies in their ideological implications.
Lithuanian national and cultural identity was shaped by multifarious
historical and ideological factors and experiences, and this process is in a
way mirrored by travel writing. For the historical background, I am
drawing on the seminal book The History of Old Lithuania: 1009-1795 by
Alfredas Bumblauskas, Professor of History at Vilnius University.5 The
Grand Duchy of Lithuania which existed from the mid-thirteenth century
until the end of the eighteenth century was a multilingual, multicultural,
and multi-confessional country. It gave rise to a nation that included
noblemen not only of Lithuanian but also of Belarusian and Polish
descent. A cradle of religious tolerance and the last pagan state in Europe
to be baptized, Lithuania adopted Christianity in 1387 and, as Prof.
Bumblauskas notes, “became an integral part of the then most advanced
civilization of the world.”6 The adoption of Christianity incited the process
of Europeanization of culture the outcome of which was the integration of
Lithuania into European society. The last pagan state managed to make a
“cultural leap” over a period of 150 years: it embraced the ideas of the
Renaissance and the Reformation, and created a legal system and Europe’s
easternmost university. It became a symbiosis of cultures and the centre of
several civilizations with its heritage of both Catholic culture relevant to
Italians, Spaniards, and Latin Americans, and the westernised heritage of
Orthodox culture important to Russians, Ukrainians, and Bulgarians. The
teaching staff of Vilnius University boasted professors from nearly all
European countries, from Spain to Norway. Historic Lithuania produced
some outstanding figures in world culture and politics, like Romain Gary,
Oscar and Czeslav Milosz, Nikolai Lobachevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Between the West and the East: Identity in Lithuanian Travel Writing
3
Ivan Bunin, and Piotr Stolypin. Interwar Lithuania offered shelter to Lev
Karsavin and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, who had fled from Bolshevik Russia.
Germans can find traces of their culture, and not only in the Klaipėda
region, which for 500 years belonged to the German Order of the Cross,
and later to Prussia and Germany, but also in other parts of Lithuania.
They can find their Gothic and Baroque monuments, to say nothing of the
German communities that existed in Vilnius and Kaunas in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries.7
Italian and Dutch masters created Renaissance and Baroque architecture,
coming through the Milanese princess Bona Sforza who brought the
Renaissance and the fork to Lithuania. Also in 1562, Lithuania got its first
and firm link to Western Europe and Italy, when the postal route VilniusKrakow-Vienna-Venice opened. Originating in the sixteenth century, the
Lithuanian Calvinist community maintained direct links with John Calvin,
and Lithuania itself received preachers from Switzerland. Hungarians may
find traces of Stephen Batory and Kaspar Bekes important. The English
would be surprised to learn that Klaipėda once had an English quarter, and
that Kėdainiai boasts Scottish houses, and archaeologists occasionally dig
up Scottish pipes in the countryside.8 Traces of European culture found in
Lithuania form an interesting cultural document and a testimony of
Lithuania’s adopting Western values in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. On the one hand, Western values and cultural influences were
instrumental in the construction of national identity. On the other hand, the
multicultural, multilingual, and multi-confessional character of the country
made the issue of national and cultural identity problematic: it was not
always possible to define who the Lithuanians were. The educated people
of the time noticing the resemblances between the Latin and Lithuanian
languages, started looking for the traces of Lithuanian origins in ancient
Roman history. This gave rise to the legend about Lithuanians coming
from the ancient Romans, which was very popular and treated in all
seriousness for a long time. Consequently, Renaissance ideas, Christian
associations with European values, as well as the theory of the ancient
Roman origins of Lithuanians were all instrumental in the formation of a
Latin cultural model in Lithuania with Latin becoming the language of
letters. The language issue again makes the construction of cultural and
national identity controversial. Should we take Samuel Johnson’s
assumption that “languages are the pedigree of nations” at face value, what
do we make of the Lithuanian pedigree when Lithuanian, Polish, and
Belarusian were spoken, and Latin was used as a written language by the
educated in Old Lithuania? The language of instruction at Vilnius
University was also Latin. In her study Renaissance and Baroque
4
Chapter One
Literature in Lithuania (2001), Eugenija Ulčinaitė, Professor of Classics at
Vilnius University, states that “it is the Latin language and the culture of
antiquity that linked us to Western Europe; Renaissance Latin texts
postulated the most significant ideas of Lithuanian statehood, defined the
forms of relationship between an individual, nation and state. Finally, it
was on the basis of literature written in Latin and its cultural impact that
Lithuanian writings grew and developed.”9 According to Ulčinaitė,
“thanks to Latin, the University of Vilnius was able to integrate itself into
the general scholarly life of Western Europe, assimilate new scientific
achievements and in its own turn spread the ideas generated by professors
of Western universities.”10
The first Lithuanian travel texts were also written in Latin and
appeared in the sixteenth century, although Lithuanians travelled in
Europe already in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, particularly
monks, traders, and diplomats. In the fifteenth century travelling became
wide-spread, when many young Lithuanian noblemen went to study
abroad to universities in Poland, Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, and
Holland. Travel abroad became fashionable. It was also regarded as an
inseparable part of one’s education as well as a mark of distinction,
creating the possibility of moving up the career ladder in the royal court.
Professor Ulčinaitė points out that the oldest Lithuanian travel text seems
to be Kelionė į Italiją: 1575 metų dienoraštis (A journey to Italy: the diary
of 1575) by Jurgis Radvila.11 Radvila (1556-1600) was a duke, a priest, as
well as a politician and a literary man who at the very young age of
twenty-three became bishop of Vilnius, and later was consecrated a
cardinal. His biography and career is emblematic of noblemen of the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania. For us it is important to note that Radvila
played a key role in helping obtain the consent of the Pope and King
Stephen Batory for the foundation of Vilnius University. His journey to
Italy started on 11 October 1575 not far from Trakai and ended in Padova
on 7 December, the same year. He and his entourage travelled via
Warsaw, Vienna, and Venice, stopping on the way to change horses, to
take meals, and to rest. As the title indicates, his travel account is written
in the form of a diary in which the author meticulously registers all the
details of the journey, providing descriptions of the places visited, people
he met, all the dates of arrivals and departures, distances between places,
and the most important sights visited. The travel record, written of course
in Latin, is quite schematic and sometimes sounds naïve, and were it
longer (it is merely a 16-page text), it would probably be dull. Still, what
appeals to the reader is a sense of immediacy and a sense of wonder with
which the traveller registers his impressions, sometimes displaying a sense
Between the West and the East: Identity in Lithuanian Travel Writing
5
of humour. It is also an interesting cultural document of the bygone epoch.
While in Vienna, Radvila, then a nineteen-year-old youth, was struck
indeed by the grandeur and beauty of the emperor Maximilian’s palace, its
gardens with pools, “full of various birds, especially pheasants and also
rabbits.”12 For instance, the entry of 14 November reads: “In the morning I
saw an elephant––an animal of enormous size––given as a present to the
emperor by the King of Spain. In the afternoon I went to pay my respects
to Mr Johan Bernstein, Chancellor of Bohemia.”13 He also records being
received by the emperor with due respect and then, shortly afterwards,
going hunting for the wild boar with the emperor and his four sons, killing
five boars and experiencing great pleasure. A special mention is made of
the fact that “returning from the hunt the emperor and the King of Rome
were kindly disposed towards me and chatted pleasantly with me.”14 From
his diary we find out that Radvila was greatly impressed by the Jesuit
College in Vienna and the neighbouring church with miraculous relics of
Blessed Virgin Mary. Radvila’s identity as a dignitary, a nobleman, and a
bishop undoubtedly emerges in his travel narrative. It leaves no doubt that
the travel account is written by a deeply religious man as a particular focus
is on the objects of religious worship. However, we find some mundane
and even funny entries. After a long and difficult crossing of the Alps on
the way from Vienna to Venice, which lasted for ten days full of dangers
and fear, they came down to the Italian plain, “the most charming in the
Venetian area,” and the entry of 1 December reads: “Thus having crossed
the unbelievably high Alps, we recovered and felt as if we had escaped
from hell and entered paradise.”15 Radvila also mentions tasting for the
first time “very delicate Italian food––frogs” in a small although pretty
town of Sacile; however, he does not elaborate on the taste or effects of
the meal. We learn that he did not stay long in Venice; in fact, he was
forced to leave it in a hurry because of the rumour about an outbreak of
plague that “did great harm not only to this city but also spread to Milan,
Mantova, Vicenza, Bergamo, Brescia.”16
The travel diary ends with two entries from Padova, where the young
duke visited a few churches, a famous school, was taken to the circus, and
went to see two comedies that he liked very much. One of the comedies
was titled “A Pastoral”; seeing it, as he put it, was a rather costly
experience because a wallet with money was stolen from his servant
Grayovsky. With this last entry of 7 December his travel diary ends.
A more sophisticated and mature, and more interesting travel narrative
from the literary point of view is Kelionė į Jeruzalę (A Pilgrimage to
Jerusalem) written by Mikalojus Kristupas Radvila Našlaitėlis (1549-
6
Chapter One
1616), a junior brother of Jurgis Radvila. He was one of the most
powerful, influential, and richest noblemen of the Lithuanian and Polish
State. A top ranking and highly educated dignitary, Radvila Našlaitėlis
studied at the universities of Leipzig, Strasbourg, Paris, and Rome. In
1567 he converted to Catholicism. Being of poor health, he made vows to
visit the Holy Land. Consequently, in September 1582 he set off on a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in December reaching Venice. From there in June
of the next year he sailed to Syria and came to Jerusalem where he stayed
for two weeks, visited the famous places of religious worship, and in late
July took a ship to Egypt. Here he spent two months and sailed back to
Italy from where in 1584 he returned home. The journey lasted two years.
His A Pilgrimage to Jerusalem was first published in Latin in 1601 and
became one of the most famous European bestsellers of the time. Until
today four Latin, nine Polish, two German, and one Russian edition of this
travel text have been published. His authentic travel account remains a
textual mystery for historians and literary scholars because his manuscript
from which the book was first published in Latin has disappeared.
Scholars do not agree on such issues as to who wrote the text––whether he
himself or his secretary (Radvila Našlaitėlis might have dictated the text to
him); when, where and in what language it was recorded; whether he was
writing it during the journey or after he came back home; whether it was
written in Latin or Polish. The opinions vary, but whatever they might be,
the book still remains a valuable historical and cultural document.
A pilgrimage is a sacred journey having its own sacred places, sacred
routes, and its account is often conveyed in a confessional mode that
imparts authenticity. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries pilgrimages
to Palestine were not rare. While it is not surprising that Radvila
Našlaitėlis described his journey to Jerusalem, it is surprising how he
described it. He gave his travel account an epistolary form popular at the
time: the book is structured in the form of four letters allegedly written to
an unidentified friend and to whom he is reporting and describing his
experiences in distant lands. It is also obvious that the structural layout of
the book was well thought out. The letters were put together much later,
summing up the travel experience rather than following a chronological
narrative. Events are not described in sequence, and the author digresses,
sometimes filling in his narrative with amusing stories and philosophizing.
This imparts a literary quality to the travel account, makes the text
emotional, attractive, easy to read and comprehend, and also keeps the
reader’s interest alive––all these ingredients turned it into a proper
bestseller. The story of the Egyptian mummies is an interesting case in
point. While in Cairo, Radvila Našlaitėlis bought two mummies for
Between the West and the East: Identity in Lithuanian Travel Writing
7
scientific purposes and, having packed them in boxes, loaded them onto
the ship. However, during the voyage a storm broke out, and the priest
started complaining about seeing two ghosts every night. Radvila
Našlaitėlis decided that it was happening because mummies were pagan
bodies, and he dumped them into the sea. The storm instantly subsided,
and the ghosts vanished.
The confessional mode of his travel text is revealing of the author’s
personality, education, his broad interests, his knowledge of history and
sciences. Radvila Našlaitėlis was interested in everything and wanted to
see and experience whatever was possible to. Thus he often changed the
itinerary of his pilgrimage. And it is not always the religious motives that
determined the length of his visit to one or another location. He stayed in
Jerusalem only two weeks, while he spent two months in Egypt. The
scholar Jūratė Kiaupienė notes with amazement: “if we compare Radvila’s
route with the one offered for tourists today, it is obvious that wherever he
went he visited the same places which are recommended for twentiethcentury travellers.”17 Travel writing can tell us not only about foreign
locations visited but also (and sometimes even more) about the cultural
background of the travel writer himself. Radvila Našlaitėlis records his
subjective travel impressions, detailed descriptions of places visited, of
nations, plants, rivers, and his encounters with people. His text also
demonstrates how knowledgeable and well-read he was; the reader sees
his attempts to analyze phenomena, trying to draw scientific conclusions,
even if they sometimes sound naïve, implausible, and hardly believable.
For instance, he notes that most people in Egypt have bad eyesight
because ordinary people live just on fruit and water. His text is filled with
references to the Bible, to ancient Roman and Greek history; he refers to
Herodotus and Pliny the Younger; he provides encyclopaedic data about,
for example, the Library of Alexandria, Egyptian pyramids (noting that it
took him an hour and a half to get to the top of the Great Pyramid), and
mummies of Ancient Egypt. Radvila Našlaitėlis was particularly interested
in the cultural “Other,” i.e., in the Muslim world, in the history and culture
of all its nations. He focused his attention on the people of Palestine,
Syria, and Egypt, on their customs, manners, and life-style. In his
descriptions of Oriental cities we find interesting and authentic historical
and cultural details of material life tinged by the traveller’s subjective
reflections. For example, the reader finds out that Damascus is a big,
pretty, and densely inhabited city, “however, rarely visited by European
traders because it is distanced from the sea and its people intensely hate
Christians.”18 Here he also discovered very good fruit to be
recommended––mauza, a banana: “it looks like our cucumber, only it is a
8
Chapter One
bit longer and thicker and grows on bushes.”19 Many of his observations
are valuable from the point of view of ethnography. Interesting is his
description of Cairo which he compares to Paris; in his opinion, Cairo “is
three times bigger than Paris, but not as nicely planned, and its houses are
not as beautiful.”20 The reader is struck by the author’s attention to detail:
he scrupulously indicates that in Cairo there are 200,000 houses and
16,000 streets, over 6000 mosques, about 20,000 public canteens,
as only the rich and the nobility cook their meals at home, while the simple
folk eat in canteens which offer a lot of meat, especially mutton. Also
plenty of duck and chicken; but rice and doughnuts cooked in oil sell
best. . . . There is no wine in Egypt. . . . Thus Christians mostly drink
Cretan wine. European consuls get their supplies of wine from Italy.21
A chance encounter with a rich local trader who informed him about his
life-style gave the writer an opportunity to reflect on the condition of
women in Arab countries. Radvila Našlaitėlis was appalled to hear that the
trader had twelve white wives and eighteen Ethiopian women. He kept
each of them in a separate room under lock and key which he carried in his
pocket, because, according to Radvila Našlaitėlis, if all the wives could
meet, they would strangle each other and would murder him. Food was
served to them through the window. The husband could also kill them all
if he chose because he bought the wives so they were his property, and
everybody can do what he likes with his property. Radvila Našlaitėlis
expresses his sympathy with the plight of the slaves exclaiming: what a
poor life those pagans lead! However, he does not judge or criticize the
foreign manners and morals; on the contrary, attention to and respect for
other religions and confessions can be easily detected in his text. The
cultural “Other” is not demonized in his travel account. He looks upon the
cultural “Other” not with a look of an arrogant foreigner but with tolerance
which is also a reflection of his national consciousness and identity. We
see national self-definition and image emerging through experiencing
foreignness and through extreme geographical and cultural differences.
Eugenija Ulčinaitė assumes that Mikalojus Radvila Našlaitėlis might
have been the first Lithuanian who had climbed to the top of the Great
Egyptian pyramid, who had described the Sphynx and the ancient
acropolis of Memphis, who had seen the Nile flood, and who had opened
the way for Lithuanians into the Orient.22 This proves that Lithuanians
have always been a nation of travellers, although it seems to contradict the
traditional stereotypical nineteenth-century image of Lithuanians as a
nation of sedentary quiet peasants firmly rooted in their farmlands.
Research shows that, curiously enough, travel writing makes up a
Between the West and the East: Identity in Lithuanian Travel Writing
9
substantial amount of the Lithuanian literary heritage, even if it has often
been regarded as an inferior genre and not favoured by our reviewers,
critics, and scholars. Travel writing particularly flourished in the early
twentieth century, in the so-called “Golden Age” (from 1918 to 1940) of
the Independent Lithuania before it was occupied by the Soviet Russia.
Historically, it was a very short but very productive period in many spheres
of the country’s life, including literature and culture in general. I will
briefly mention a few of the most outstanding and conspicuous travellers
and travel writers, although I am aware that they deserve separately more
lengthy discussion. Their fascinating life-stories encapsulating the
workings and somersaults of history and fate could be an object of fiction
in their own right. Matas Šalčius (1890-1940), a famous journalist,
actively involved in politics and in shaping the image of Lithuania, was
the director of the Lithuanian Press Agency (ELTA) as well as the
precursor of “the new journalism” in Lithuania, who tried to combine the
fictional mode with factual journalism, the genre of the short-story with
the news article. He published his travel impressions of India in six
volumes entitled Svečiuose pas 40 tautų (A Guest visit to 40 nations;
1935-36) which enjoyed immense popularity. His life ended while
travelling in Brasil. His travel companion to India was Antanas Poška
(1903-92), a man of extraordinary fate, whose life is a picaresque novel of
adventures. It was his idea to reach the mysterious India by motorcycle.
Having left India to return to Lithuania, Poška was taken for a British spy
in Turkey, arrested, and imprisoned. After a series of trying experiences
and misadventures, he was finally deported to Bulgaria. At long last after
seven years of travelling he came back to Lithuania and recorded his travel
experiences in the book, Nuo Baltijos iki Bengalijos (From the Baltic to
Bengal; 1936). His other forced “journey” began in 1946 when he was
arrested by the Soviet KGB and deported to the Gulag (where he nearly
died of hunger but was lucky to survive) and, finally, only in 1958 he
returned home to Vilnius.
One of our best inter-war novelists, Antanas Vienuolis, was commissioned
by the daily paper Lietuvos aidas to record his travel impressions from
various European countries. Subsequently, after many years his travel
accounts were published in a separate volume Kelionių apybraižos (Travel
Sketches; 1988). Most of the texts were written in the form of letters, and
they form separate parts or chapters of the book, such as “Letters from
Paris,” “Letters from Finland,” “Letters from Munich,” and “Letters from
Salzburg.” This travel book also deserves separate discussion as a valuable
cultural document providing insights into pre-World-War-Two European
life and culture filtered through the outsider’s focus.
10
Chapter One
Sacred or utopian places exert a particular fascination and, in Lithuanian
travel writing, are mythologized––for example, the West in Soviet times
or the Orient in postmodernity. Travel books by two very different
Lithuanian writers of the late twentieth century, Romualdas Lankauskas
and Jurga Ivanauskaitė, are good cases in point to support this thesis.
Romualdas Lankauskas (1932) is a famous short-story writer, a
novelist, and a painter who for his laconic and terse style has been labelled
by Lithuanian critics as “the Lithuanian Hemingway.” In his article, “The
City, Travel and Time: an Exhibition of Romualdas Lankauskas’ Paintings
and Art Objects,” the art critic Vidas Poškus reviewing Lankauskas’s
recent exhibition of paintings and art objects points out that Lankauskas
“is one of the pioneers of abstract painting in Lithuania” and “a
representative of the Lithuanian beatnik generation of the mid-sixties,”
whose organic synthesis of literature and painting relates him to Friedrich
Durrenmatt.23 In the era of mass travel which started taking off probably in
the 1960s, the Iron Curtain separated Lithuania from the Western world,
and West European countries which are very close geographically were
ideologically distant and unreachable, thus becoming a source of
mysterious fascination. The forbidden fruit is always sweeter. Two travel
books, Cicadas of Tokyo (Tokijo cikados, 1989) and Europe: What is it
like? (Europa, kokia ji?, 1994) by Romualdas Lankauskas, emblematize
Lithuanian national consciousness, manifesting the images of the West
and the Orient imprinted in the nation’s mentality and articulating how the
West and the East (Japan in this case) were experienced and imagined in
the Soviet period. Apart from its aesthetic and cultural value,
Lankauskas’s travel writing is socially and ideologically conscious,
resisting the colonizer’s discourse. His travel books explicitly demonstrate
his fascination with the geographical and cultural Otherness of the West
and Japan – “the forbidden Other” which is not demonized but celebrated
as a place of a more advanced civilization, a superior social system, human
values, and life-styles. Thus, his travel texts in a way turn into a delicate
ideological weapon to challenge the system by demonstrating different
existential possibilities and a superior set of values inscribed in them. The
West and Japan are mythologized as a utopia, as something desirable, a
place of hope and aspiration, where darkness is excluded; the West
becomes a metaphorical space instrumental in the critique of the Soviet
system and society. The notion of the Orient is problematized in
Lankauskas’s travel text about Japan which is conceptualized and reflected
on as a cultural rather than a geographical space – as a site of Western
values. The writer firmly believes that Western values have always been
the basis of Lithuanian national and cultural identity and his travel writing
Between the West and the East: Identity in Lithuanian Travel Writing
11
postulates this idea both implicitly and explicitly. In his travel book
Europe: What is it like?, Lankauskas writes:
I have never felt a stranger anywhere, particularly in Europe because I also
belong to this very continent marked by common cultural history and
psychology. After all, I was born in Klaipėda, the westernmost part of
Lithuania. Thus Europe has always been my true home. Of course,
Lithuania today differs greatly from France or Holland, and its sole
resemblance to Finland extends merely to the green landscape. . . . This
crucial difference essentially lies in lagging behind in all the spheres of
life, which is the choky fruit of Soviet socialism and of long years of
occupation.24
On the other hand, the most striking feature of the aesthetics of
Lankauskas’s travel texts are visual elements, the poetic touch that he
imparts to what otherwise would be an ordinary travel account, a record of
facts and events. As in his fiction, in his travel texts the topos or motive of
“a journey” also acquires a symbolic and existential meaning. His travel
books, similarly to diaries and memoirs, are marked by the author’s
individuality and reflexivity, tinged by subjective emotions. It is this
reflexivity and subjectivity as well as the visual quality that define the
greatest value of his travel books. Reading them leaves no doubt that they
have been written by a novelist and a painter who keeps moving back and
forth in time and space, who is playing with light and colours, for whom
the smells and the taste of things are extremely important and who at times
becomes a philosopher. In some flashbacks he plunges into personal
reminiscences turning the private into the public. This is, for instance, how
Cicadas of Tokyo that also bears the subtitle Memories of A Journey
begins:
Japan …Could I ever, let us say, a few decades or more ago have believed
that the day would come when I would visit it? No, I could not because to
dream of a journey to Japan would have meant to be carried away into the
realm of sheer fantasy which, it seemed, was never to become reality. . . .
To find myself in Japan, to see it with my own eyes, to set foot on its soil–
–could this dream come true? Sometimes one is suddenly visited by a
strange thought about things having magic power . . . Why? What things?
Well, for instance, an old and very beautiful porcelain sugar-bowl with a
typical Japanese landscape painted on its side; since childhood it has stood
in our family cupboard and by sheer miracle has survived until now when
everything else is long gone . . . My father must have bought it about fifty
years ago in Klaipėda, or maybe in Germany where every spring the
famous Leipzig fairs took place. Time passed, and I would often gaze at
this exotic, colourfully painted sugar-bowl, trying to imagine a terribly
12
Chapter One
distant and mysterious country from which it had come to Lithuania and
into my life. I grew up with it. Could this sugar-bowl have really contained
some magic power or could have hidden a certain sign of fate as if saying
that the time would come when this charming little picture painted on its
side would turn into tangible reality, that a live, authentic landscape of the
country of the Rising Sun would unfold before my eyes in all its subtle and
amazing beauty?25
Lankauskas’s Europe: What is it like? is structured like a mosaic of
fragments, a record of impressions of his shorter or longer visits to various
European countries. The very titles of the chapters are telling, suggestive
and at times emblematic, like, for example, “The French Collage,”
“Portuguese Colours,” “The Light of Athens,” “Reflections in the
Lagoon,” “A Return to Rome,” “Gentlemen and a Pastoral Landscape with
Ghosts.” His own identity as a writer and an artist is clearly inscribed in
this book which is saturated with references to literature and art. For
instance, writing about Paris, Lankauskas reflects on innovative artistic
movements that defined the character and atmosphere of early-twentiethcentury Paris; he refers to Emile Zola, to the writers of “the lost
generation,” like F. Scott Fitzgerald and, of course, to Ernest Hemingway
and his book A Movable Feast about his youth spent in Paris as a young
American journalist and writer just embarking on his literary career.
Lankauskas also remembers numerous Lithuanian writers and artists who
studied and lived in Paris before the Second World War, including the
poet Juozas Tysliava who edited and published “Muba,” an avant garde
literary magazine to which Jean Cocteau was a contributor. This
referentiality often triggers self-reflection and adds substance and “a third
dimension” to the travel account.
In 1994, the novelist, essayist, poetess, and painter Jurga Ivanauskaitė
(1961-2007) went for the first time to India where in Dharamsala she
studied Tibetan Buddhism. A few years later the writer spent a year
travelling in India and Nepal, staying for some time in a Buddhist
monastery high in the mountains, in total seclusion, far away from the
civilized world, immersing herself in the study of religious texts, in
mantras, mandalas, and meditation. She wrote about her travel experiences
in Kelionė į Šambalą (A Journey to Shambhala; 1997), which is more than
a travel account. Rather, it is a journey of self-discovery, the search for the
Self. The travel atmosphere and way of travelling are very important,
coming across through Ivanauskaitė’s sometimes mildly ironic
descriptions of hotels, cafes, guides, and the means of travel. India and
Nepal are used as an imaginative escape, a relaxation from Western values
Between the West and the East: Identity in Lithuanian Travel Writing
13
and rigid rationalism. In Ivanauskaitė’s travel book, these places are both
real and imaginary: they function as precise geographical locations
(replete with people, customs, landscape, weather, food, clothing, etc.), but
they are also imbued with symbolic meaning. The title-word Shambhala
(which is also the key-word) assumes a special significance: it is both a
concrete and a symbolic space. First, “Shambhala” is a small café
described as “probably the most popular meeting-point in all
Dharamsala”;26 it also functions as a sort of post-office with its noticeboard, and as a point of allocation bustling with “newcomers hunched
under the burden of big back-packs and still bigger illusions.”27 The
concept of Shambhala is, however, expanded to signify the Oriental
milieu, which, according to Ivanauskaitė, induces a bizarre change in the
newcomers’ identity. Casting a critical and ironic gaze on the newcomers
to the East, including herself, the writer observes: “The Oriental
environment hypnotizes and drugs them, enslaves, subjugates,
depersonalizes, and completely dissolves them. This might be the bliss of
Extinction that the decadents of the West dreamt about, but it is by no
means Freedom or Light.”28
The writer provides the reader with the insider’s view of the East,
combining her personal experiences with general observations about the
oriental life-style, Buddhist philosophy, and religion, throwing in
theorizing about such things as psychoanalysis, the sacred, and the
profane, interweaving her narrative with historical excursions and legends.
Hers is an interesting text with a strong self-reflexive quality, full of
references to diverse philosophical and religious sources. Ivanauskaitė’s
book combines external and internal stories; an external chain of events
serves as a spring-board for self-reflection and philosophizing. Thus her
travel account reads both like an adventure novel, a confession revealing
the writer’s existential anguish caused by the crisis of values, and, at
times, like an essay; it leaves no doubt that Ivanauskaitė is well-versed in
the Buddhist doctrine; however, often she becomes too fond of dealing out
simplistic truths. The adventure stories she is spinning is her greatest asset,
not theorizing and naïve philosophizing drawn from other texts, the list of
which she provides at the end of her book, ranging from works by Mircea
Eliade and E. M. Bernbaum to The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Ivanauskaitė
herself admits that all those texts “accompanied, protected and inspired”
her on her sacred journey. Her strength as a writer lies in her powers of
observation, in the subjective account (often tinged with irony and selfirony) of her travel experiences, of encounters with all sorts of people,
both local and strangers to the East. Her impressions and detailed,
expansive, “baroque” descriptions of the people and places all open up the
14
Chapter One
unfamiliar, bizarre, and fascinating world of the Orient upon which the
writer looks with admiration and in which nothing astounds her except two
things: a young nun with a shaved head, breast-feeding a two-week old
baby in the bus station and a turbaned Sikh, the owner of a small and cosy
restaurant, who is stuck behind the cash register, passionately immersed in
and completely carried away by Nabokov’s Lolita. Time spent in the East
taught the writer Peace and Wisdom.
The writer plays with the opposition between the West and the East,
and it is the East that is privileged while the West is demonized.
According to Ivanauskaitė, “the West increasingly suffers from the
dangerous abyss dividing the intellect and the Spirit.”29 Although this
issue is more problematic than it might appear at first sight, and the writer
is conscious of the ambivalent situation she and other foreigners find
themselves in exploring the East, she herself feels stuck between the two
cultures––that of the East and of the West––and is keenly aware of the
differences between them. Observing life in India and Nepal with its dire
poverty, its squalor and stink, and in spite of all the hardships she herself
experienced in the East, the writer draws the conclusion: “I do not know
why this everyday reality speaks to me while the other one, obscured by
the facades of posh houses, glittering and spotlessly clean shop-windows,
abracadabra of advertisements, is increasingly becoming more and more
mute.”30 In the Himalayas she is astounded by the dire poverty of the
people who nevertheless seem to be able to live a happy life in a friendly
community, in harmony with each other and with nature. Moved by her
experiences in the East, she makes the following declaration: “Because
deserts actually do not stretch here where it is so easy and free but in
hysterical big cities of the West, in the hearts of their well-fed
inhabitants.”31 Thus her travel book also casts an ironic look on Western
civilization; it is a critique of consumerism, and functions as a
construction of new myths: the wisdom and peace of the East is
postulated, the East which is very much desirable but not attainable for the
westerners. Ivanauskaitė’s text ironizes the clichéd Western image of the
East as an earthly Paradise where crowds of westerners flock looking for
escape, salvation, and redemption; however, their spiritual search turns out
to be not that simple, because all the problems, according to Tibetans, are
not caused by the external world but are lurking inside ourselves. Having
fled their own lives with the spirit of materialism and consumerism,
foreigners are trapped in the enclosure of exoticism, and their search for
spirituality (or novelty and break, rather, as one suspects) becomes
problematic while their newly assumed identity is ambivalent. The
“psychonauts” (the term coined by Ivanauskaitė) who come to the East